IBIA’s Khalid Ali on Africa: more alerts may mean stronger integrity monitoring, not more match-fixing

IBIA says its African alert data should not be read as a simple match-fixing meter. The bigger point for PSPs and regulated operators is that as Africa’s betting market gets more digital and account-based, integrity systems generate more usable intelligence — and more alerts.

1. In IBIA’s 2025 Sports Betting Integrity Report, data from H2 Gambling Capital projects Africa’s total betting gross gambling revenue will rise from $3.5 billion in 2021 to $19.4 billion by 2030. Most of that growth is expected to come from online betting, forecast to reach $16.4 billion by 2030, with $13 billion, or 79%, generated onshore.
2. Khalid Ali, chief executive of the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA), says that growth is not just a risk story. His point is that digital, account-based betting gives licensed operators data they can actually use to spot suspicious activity before it escalates. For regulated PSPs and operators, that is the practical upside of moving more volume into account-based channels.
3. Football remains the dominant betting product, and around 90% of IBIA’s football alerts globally involve customer accounts located outside the jurisdiction in which the sporting event takes place. Ali says that is why integrity threats cannot be handled only at the national level: IBIA combines global monitoring with local partnerships so suspicious patterns seen across multiple operators and jurisdictions can be passed quickly to the relevant authorities.
4. On Africa specifically, IBIA reported 117 alerts relating to African sporting events between 2021 and 2025, including 31 in 2025. In that year, Africa accounted for around 10% of all alerts globally. IBIA also recorded 17 alerts in the first half of 2026, which Ali says is “reasonably consistent” with 2025 rather than evidence of a significant increase.
5. Ali’s main warning is methodological: more alerts do not automatically mean more match-fixing. He points to growing betting activity, more Africa-facing operators joining international integrity monitoring networks, and more account-level data from regulated online betting as reasons alert counts can rise while integrity systems are simply becoming more effective at detection.

IBIA’s reading matters in practice because it cuts against a lazy equation that some operators still make: more monitoring equals more crime. In a market where online betting in Africa is expanding fast and regulatory maturity varies widely by jurisdiction, the alert volume is also a sign of how much data the market is now producing for compliance and integrity teams to work with.